4 Key Learning Practices For Self-Study Chamorro Language Learners

The end of this April marks four years since I commited myself to learning the Chamorro language. I cannot believe that it has already been so long! It has certainly been a crazy journey full of ups and downs, and if I had to do it again I would still choose to learn Chamorro. To celebrate this language “milestone”, in this post I talk about the four main learning practices that are crucial to helping me learn the language, as a primarily self-study Chamorro language learner who started at level 0.

9 Tips and Tricks to Find Chamorro Words

Do you ever come across a Chamorro word and then spend hours trying to figure out what it means because you can’t find it in the dictionary? Or do you struggle to know how to use words once you find them in the dictionary? I think every learner of Chamorro at every level encounters the frustration of struggling to find words. With our incomplete dictionaries, varying orthographies, and the small amount of Chamorro media available for supporting learners, it can make learning really difficult and time-consuming, especially if we can’t ask any speakers. In this post I’m going to share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years for finding words in Chamorro, which is geared toward people who may be unable to ask native speakers for help. I hope these tips can save you some time :)

How to Improve Your Listening Comprehension in Chamorro

Have you ever found yourself listening to a Chamorro conversation, song or story but it all just sounds like meaningless noise in your ears? That was me for the first 2.5 years of learning Chamorro. Listening comprehension has always been my weakest skill (in anything, to be honest) and it seemed like a mysterious process to move from understanding nothing to, at the very least, staying afloat in conversation. But I’ve learned that improving our listening skills in Chamorro is just like strengthening any other skill. It’s not magic, it just takes consistent practice and active engagement with the right materials that actually support our learning. So in this post I’m going to talk about my study practice for improving listening comprehension in Chamorro.

How to Make Effective Flashcards for Studying Chamorro Outside of Class or Praktika

A common question that people often ask is “What can I do to study Chamorro on my own?” We know we need to “study” outside of the classes or practice groups we attend, but what does that actually look like? A common resource people may be given (especially beginners) are sentence drills – our grammar books are full of them in order to explain specific topics, and drilling them can help us learn words, conjugations and language structure. But just reading through the example sentences can get kind of boring, and translating a sentence is only part of the practice we need. So in this post, I’ll walk through how we can get more out of these sentence drills by making different types of digital flashcards that can give us effective self-study experiences.

How to Understand Longer Thoughts in Chamorro

Do you ever feel like your comprehension drops off when confronted with a long stream of Chamorro? At the end of last year, this would happen to me all the time – when a speaker would start talking to me, I felt like I could only grab the first 5-6 words of what they were saying before I’d get lost in a jumble of Chamorro that I couldn’t process. The same thing happened with reading – really long sentences felt impossible to process or took egregious amounts of time to translate, and I’d always feel discouraged. Since January I’ve been using a method called chunking, which has made it easier for me to follow and comprehend more long-form Chamorro. In this post I will talk about how I use this method to learn Chamorro.

Three Tips for Beginners

I’ve been reflecting upon my language learning journey these past couple of weeks, thinking back to when I first started learning the language. There were a lot of things I did that really helped me, but also some key areas that I would do differently . Here are my reflections, distilled as my top three tips for beginners who are getting started in learning Chamoru.